What does it mean to say someone has a “reason” to act a certain way? What makes it true that you do, or don’t, have a reason to do something? This book’s first lecture describes three theories on the subject:
Scanlon makes an important point about desire-based views: they “can be understood in two very different ways, and statements of these theories often do not clearly distinguish between them.” (p. 5) They can be taken to make “substantive normative claims” (i.e., you should do what would fulfill your desires) or “to offer … a reductive claim” (i.e., saying you have a reason to do something is merely another way of saying that it would fulfill your desires).
Anecdotally, I think many people are drawn to desire-based theories because a reductionist account fits well with a mechanistic view of the universe and seems to leave no unresolved mysteries. But sometimes the same people espouse the idea that you should try to fulfill your desires—that it’s somehow irrational not to. Their reductionist view leaves no way of making any meaningful claim along those lines. For a consistent reductionist, I think, any attempt to call you irrational or misguided for not trying to achieve your own desires must ultimately be a tautological observation: they’re merely pointing out that if you don’t do what would best achieve your desires, you aren’t doing what would best achieve your desires. Scanlon says:
It seems, then, that desire theories face a dilemma: either they begin with a normative claim about reasons for action, in which case they do not explain the features of reasons that may seem puzzling; or else they make a reductive claim, which eliminates normativity altogether. (p. 7)
He also says that isn’t why he rejects such theories…
A main goal of the book is to argue that reasons really are fundamental in spite of such “features that may seem puzzling”. This means the first horn of the dilemma—appealing to a normative truth saying we should pursue our desires (or something along those lines)—is compatible with Scanlon’s metaphysical/epistemological views (see lecture 4, around p. 87). But he does not think such a “normative desire theory” has “plausible consequences about what we have reason to do”(p. 87). He also thinks it “misdescribes the relation between desires and reasons from an agent’s own point of view”(p. 88), a point he discussed at length in What We Owe to Each Other (see my summary of that in slide 7 of this slideshow).
I agree the dilemma isn’t sufficient reason to reject desire-based views, but I think it undermines much of their appeal. If you’re willing to believe in the existence of the kind of fundamental normative truths necessary to take the first horn, it’s far from obvious why there should be such truths telling us to follow our desires but not truths telling us to do other things (like pursue pleasure or virtue). If you think the idea of fundamental normative truths is unacceptably weird, you have to take the second horn of the dilemma, which I think has more radically nihilistic implications than people typically realize: not only does it mean there’s no objective basis for criticizing someone who ignores moral considerations, it also means there’s no objective basis for criticizing yourself or others for acting contrary to your/their own interests or desires. (Although you could still say things like I should pursue my desires, it would be an empty statement, because the word ‘should’ could not have any deeper meaning than simply to be an arbitrary label grouping together all the actions that have the property of promoting your desires.)
Although Scanlon makes more of an attempt to give a positive account of how we could know normative truths than Parfit did, I still feel like a crucial piece is missing. He draws analogies between mathematical and normative truths, but I suspect the idea that mathematical claims are objectively true/false can be fully cashed out in terms of the idea that some set of claims do/don’t form an internally consistent system. (Maybe Scanlon disagrees; see lecture 4 section 2.) Consistency is a (relatively) non-mysterious concept whose objectivity is (relatively) non-mysterious; what criteria we should use in judging normative claims, and why those criteria have objective validity, seems more mysterious. And though I agree with Scanlon that the pursuit of reflective equilibrium is the right way to justify our judgments about normative claims, I still want a theory about why any of the normative intuitions that feed into that process should be seen as real insights rather than arbitrary biases.
(The discussion of such epistemological issues in lecture 4 is nuanced and might be worth revisiting in the future.)
Longer notes…
Scanlon lists several issues about reasons that we’d want a theory to address: the nature of their “Relational Character” (“[r]easons are reasons for an agent” (p. 3)), whether/how they have “Determinate Truth Values”, how their “Supervenience” on “natural facts” works, how we have “Knowledge” of them, how it’s possible for them to have “Practical Significance”, what it means for different reasons to have different degrees of “Strength”, and the puzzle of “Optionality”.
I like his breakdown of “three kinds of objections” to Reasons Fundamentalism:
Metaphysical objections claim that a belief in irreducibly normative truths would commit us to facts or entities that would be metaphysically odd—incompatible, it is sometimes said, with a scientific view of the world.
Epistemological objections maintain that if there were such truths we would have no way of discovering them.
Practical objections maintain that if conclusions about what we have reason to do were simply beliefs in a kind of fact, they could not have the practical significance that reasons are commonly supposed to have. (p. 16, line breaks and emphasis added)
Lecture 2 addresses metaphysical objections. First, Scanlon argues that there are various “domains” such as “mathematics, science, and moral and practical reasoning” (p. 18) which each have their own “standards” for determining the truth of claims within them. If we try to apply the standards we use for evaluating claims about the physical world to claims about reasons or mathematical objects, we may worry that saying the latter “exist” implies they have some sort of mysterious quasi-physical existence; Scanlon would instead say that those things “exist” in the sense that certain statements about them are true according to the standards appropriate for the domain those statements belong to.
The claim that mountains exist is licensed by and licenses certain other claims about the physical world. The claim that there exists a number or set of a certain kind is licensed by and licenses certain other mathematical claims. And in each case that is all there is to it. (p. 25)
Is there, as e.g. Hume thought, a “gap” such that we can’t reach normative conclusions from only non-normative premises? Scanlon says yes: to fully explain the move from a non-normative statement to a normative one we ultimately need to appeal to some “pure normative claim”, which for example could be something like “anyone in [certain] circumstances has reason to do what is necessary to prolong his life.” (p. 39)
When we see that the role of pure normative claims is precisely to license such moves, it is no longer surprising that we cannot “get from” a normative claim to a non-normative one without “already making” a normative claim. (p. 39)
Scanlon thinks that not only are there irreducibly normative concepts, there are also irreducibly normative properties. The distinction between concepts and properties sounds abstruse, but these passages help clarify it:
Identifying concepts is a matter of determining the content of our thoughts. Specifying properties is a matter of determining the nature of things in the world to which those concepts correspond. …
The concept, morally wrong, for example, includes such marks as being “an action that anyone has very strong reason not to perform, and which makes appropriate guilt on the part of one who has done it and resentment on the part of those to whom it is done.” But this leaves open what reason there is not to perform these actions, and to feel guilt or resentment as a result of their being done. A person can understand and employ the concept morally wrong without having a very clear idea what these reasons are, just as someone can have the concept, water, without knowing the chemical composition of water. There is more to be said about what makes something morally wrong, and the task of giving this further account might be said to be the task of characterizing the property of moral wrongness. (p. 33-34)
Scanlon responds to arguments by Gibbard (Thinking How to Live), Schroeder (Slaves of the Passions), and Jackson (From Metaphysics to Ethics) which (maybe) argue that irreducibly normative concepts nevertheless correspond to natural properties.
Lecture 3 addresses the concern, which might be raised in favor of expressivism, “that an account that interprets judgments about reasons as beliefs is unable to explain the practical significance of such judgments, in particular their connection with action.” (p. 53) I’m not sure I fully understand the concern here. Scanlon’s answer—which he says is “commonsensical”, and it does seem so to me—seems to be basically that part of being rational just is to be the sort of creature whose behavior is affected by its beliefs about reasons.
…a being is a rational agent only if the judgments that it makes about reasons make a difference to the actions and attitudes that it proceeds to have. (p. 54)
Scanlon is responding to expressivists including Hare and Gibbard; those views try to give an “account of the common-sense idea of treating something as a reason” which avoids “attribut[ing] to rational agents beliefs about which things are reasons” (p. 57), whereas Scanlon’s account does the latter. He gives some arguments against expressivism that seem fairly familiar (and correct, imo), e.g. its inability to account for “the possibility that one[self] might be fundamentally in error in one’s [own] normative beliefs” (p. 60) Lecture 3 section 4 is difficult for me to follow but seems to be saying that expressivism can’t make sense of what’s going on when a person asks themselves what should I do?
Scanlon addresses complaints that an appeal to objectively correct reasons is ultimately just “foot-stamping” or a desire to have an external authority to tell you what to do/want. In terms of providing any deeper account of what a normative truth is or how it’s possible for it to exist, though, the book so far can’t provide any further illumination.
Lecture 4 is where Scanlon tries to give a positive account of how we can know normative truths. In section 2 he discusses, as an analogy, how we judge truth in the the realm of mathematics, particularly with regard to set theory. We don’t use empirical methods; yet, he argues, “the modes of thinking that support set-theoretic axioms do not consist simply in recognizing conceptual truths.”(p. 73) Axioms can also “be supported” by “the plausibility of [their] consequences”(p. 74).
It might be said, then, that the axioms of set theory are justified ultimately by what Rawls called the method of reflective equilibrium.(p. 76)
Scanlon discusses this method in section 3. He addresses the concern that this process’s ability to justify conclusions depends on already having some justification for accepting one’s judgments regarding the topic, and he seems to some extent to agree, but I’m left confused by his comments because it seems like a large piece of the “positive” account of knowing normative truths is still missing.
In the fifth section of lecture 4 Scanlon discusses constructivism:
Although I think that constructivist accounts of justice and morality have considerable plausibility, I do not believe that a plausible constructivist account of reasons for action in general can be given. (p. 98)
He uses his own contractualist moral theory and Rawls’s theory of justice as examples. IIUC, he’s saying that we might be able to justify some constructivist account of one of those topics via reflective equilibrium, but the question of how much reason we have to act in accordance with justice/morality would remain—and we probably can’t resolve such questions with a constructivist account. Korsgaard’s theory would be one attempt, which he thinks fails; he also mentions “the formal conception of rationality discussed by John Broome and others”(p. 100), which can’t fill the role because it has “no substantive implications about the reasons people have.”(p. 100) He additionally rejects a constructivist account by Sharon Street based on the idea of reflective equilibrium. Rather, he thinks:
Our confidence that statements about reasons have determinate truth values thus depends on our confidence in the results of this process [of ‘seeking reflective equilibrium’] in particular cases rather than on some general account of reasons, of the sort that a normative desire theory, or a global constructivist theory, would provide.(p. 104)
Lecture 5 discusses the idea that different reasons have different strengths. Scanlon does not think strength is a sort of quantity attached to a reason which can be assessed in isolation (e.g. by calculating the expected utility of a course of action); rather:
The strength of a reason is an essentially comparative notion, understood only in relation to other particular reasons.(p. 111)
